Technical interview
Also called: coding interview, skills assessment
The three common formats
- Live coding / pair programming. Candidate works through a problem with the interviewer present. Reveals thought process, communication, and how they handle being stuck. Test bias toward whiteboarding under pressure.
- System design. Senior roles. Candidate sketches an architecture for a problem. Reveals tradeoff thinking and judgment at scale.
- Take-home + review. Candidate does the work async; interviewer reviews and asks follow-ups live. Lower pressure, more reflective of actual work, but takes the candidate’s time on speculation.
What technical interviews are not for
They are not for testing memorized algorithms a candidate would Google in real work. The relevant question is “can this person do the job,” not “can they pass the puzzle.”
Most failures here come from disconnecting the interview from the role. A team that interviews on tree-traversal puzzles for a role about debugging existing Python codebases is measuring the wrong thing.
How long
60-90 minutes is the practical maximum for a live technical. Take-homes should cap at 3-4 hours of candidate time. Anything more is exploitation of the candidate’s free labor.
Where Join fits
Technical-interview rubrics attach to the role with separate scoring for problem-solving, code quality, and communication. See the features page.
